An Indicator for Post-disaster Economic Loss Valuation of Impacts on Cultural Heritage

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR) upholds the development and implementation of measures to reduce hazard exposure and vulnerability to disasters. Among other aspects, the SFDRR recognizes the importance of cultural heritage and its irreplaceable value for society, thus emphasizing the need to assess the impact that potential hazards may have on cultural heritage assets. One of the challenges for the disaster risk management sector is to integrate losses that are difficult to monetize into loss estimation procedures to obtain a sound quantification of disaster impacts. In this context, the losses to cultural heritage and the relation between them and society are particularly important.In light of this, a new indicator is proposed that provides a quantitative estimate of the loss in value of cultural heritage assets damaged by hazardous events. The loss in value is estimated as a function of the (physical) damage that cultural heritage assets sustained and of the positive estimated economic impact that cultural heritage has in a given country or region. The proposed indicator is not meant to reflect the true value of economic losses. Instead, it reflects a standardized measure of potential economic losses that is comparable across countries or regions. Details of the methodology are presented along with an illustrative application to a case study.